E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER Volume 32, No. 26-27, June 28, 2018

E.I.R.STRATEGIC ALERT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
Volume 32, No. 26-27, June 28, 2018

Geopolitics Is a Lose-Lose Proposition In just over four weeks after the historic summit between Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un on June 12, the US President may cause even greater howls from the trans-Atlantic establishment by meeting with Russian President Putin. Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton left for Moscow on June 27 for preliminary talks, and as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it, “it’s likely President Trump will be meeting with his counterpart in the not too distant future following that meeting” (cf. below). According to media reports, including the Austrian Kronen Zeitung , the Austrian authorities are prepared to host the two leaders on July 15 in Vienna, although neither the Kremlin nor the White House have confirmed anything, as of this writing. In the meantime, a Congressional delegation, including Republican Senators Richard Shelby, John Neely Kennedy and John Hoeven, is scheduled to travel to Moscow in early July. If the summit does take place, it does not mean the two leaders will see eye to eye, but it will have broken the ostracism that the West has foolishly imposed on Russia in the past years. During that time, Moscow has considerably developed its relations in Eurasia, in Asia more generally and with China more particularly. All this on the backdrop of the Belt and Road Initiative. South Korean President Moon Jae-in made a three-day visit to Moscow June 21-23, where he urged a trilateral alliance with the two Koreas. In addition to discussions with his Russian counterpart, he became the first South Korean head of state to address the state Duma. Moon has proposed building “nine bridges” with Russia: in gas, rail, electricity,, shipbuilding, job creation, the Northern Sea Route, seaports, agriculture and fishing. During the same period, Chairman Kim paid his third visit to China in the past months. Indeed, Chinese President Xi played a key role in organizing the rapprochement between North Korea and the United States and intends to contribute to the security guarantees that Pyongyang demands. On the second day of his trip, Kim Jong-un visited the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, reflecting his interest in learning  more about the advances made by China during its period of reform and opening up, and how to best fight poverty. On June 14, China established the “One Belt And One Road’” Scientific Research Institute Alliance in Shenyang, the closest major Chinese city to the North Korean border, which will facilitate the extension of the New Silk Road into East Asia.
Japan is also very much a part of the development dynamic. In fact, the government has revised its program on “infrastructure exports”, to include cooperation with China in promoting infrastructure projects in third countries, in the context of the Belt and Road. Finally, President Moon is looking to increase cooperation with the Asian infrastructure Investment Bank, which provides a most welcome, alternative means of funding projects to the Washington and London-dominated World Bank. Trump Prepares Summit with Putin  Which Could Become a Game-Changer With National Security adviser John Bolton travelling to Russia this week to prepare for a summit between Presidents Trump and Putin, it appears that, finally, the two world leaders will have an opportunity to meet. If the meeting does occur, it will represent a decisive defeat for those who have dedicated the last two years to prevent such a summit, including through the fraudulent narrative of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, and Trump’s collusion with the meddlers in order to get elected. While Trump has had useful, impromptu meetings with Putin on the sidelines of conferences in Hamburg, Germany (G20) and in Vietnam (APEC summit) the “Russiagate” scandal in the United States has definitely constrained the President from pursuing, as he had promised during the campaign, a friendly, cooperative relationship with Russia, to jointly resolve hot spots such as Ukraine and Syria. And, indeed, preventing that has been the primary purpose of the unprecedented “witch hunt” against the duly elected President of the United States. Vladimir Putin has also been “demonized” by the “British Empire faction” to a truly grotesque point. Trump’s determination was addressed in an article in the New Yorker magazine on June 15 by Susan Glasser. “There’s no stopping him,” a senior administration official told her. “He’s going to do it. He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he’s going to have a meeting with Putin.”  Trump showed a similar resolve in his insistence on organizing a summit with North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong-un, which he carried out “in spite of his advisers, not because of them, and with little genuine support from either Republicans or Democrats,” Glasser writes. He “has increasingly acted like a President unbound,” she concludes, “undeterred by the troublesome politics that would make a Putin summit unimaginable at this point in any other Presidency.”
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Trump has been emboldened to go for a summit now by two parallel developments. First was the success of his meeting with North Korea’s Kim, which resulted from the intent of the two leaders to avoid a war, and from close diplomatic collaboration between the U.S. President and his counterparts from China, Russia, South Korea and Japan. This collaboration going forward will be crucial in preventing the imperial, geopolitical forces from carrying out their agenda. Second has been the ongoing unravelling of Russiagate. Revelations from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Inspector General’s report, released last week, show a pattern of biased and illegal actions of DOJ and FBI officials, first in the attempt to prevent Trump’s election and then to remove him from office in one way or another (cf. SAS 24, 25/18). The non-stop hype around Trump’s “cruel” policies of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border -- which was ignored by the media when it was done by President Obama -- has been used to divert attention from both the success of the Singapore summit and the spectacular collapse of the Mueller “witch hunt.” The Key to Solving the Ibero-American Migrant Crisis, China-US Cooperation Illegal immigration to the United States from Mexico and Central America has become a politically explosive issue over recent weeks. But all sides of the debate would do well to take a lesson from Socrates: If you want to come up with the right answer, you first have to ask the right question. As of 2015, 11.5 million first generation Mexicans (i.e., people born in Mexico), nearly 10% of the population, had emigrated to the U.S.; over 20% of El Salvador’s 6.3 million people had done the same. Taking into account 1st-3rd generations – that is, including the children and grand-children of those who emigrated to the U.S. -- it amounts to a shocking 28% of Mexico’s current population and 35% of El Salvador’s. The situation for Guatemala and Honduras is similar. Why is this happening? Because the Potential Relative Population Density (PRPD) of the economies of the region has been deliberately driven down to way below their actual populations. As Lyndon LaRouche has explained, when the PRPD – the power of an economy to maintain a growing population at an improving living standard – falls below its actual population for any period of time, the people either die off or attempt to flee in desperation. That is exactly what has occurred throughout this region as the result of intentional depopulation measures known to the British empire: loot the population mercilessly through City of London and Wall Street debt policies; unleash deadly wars; and subject those countries to a take-over by London’s Dope, Inc. apparatus and their narco-terrorist gangs. Exemplary is the fact that the satanic MS-13 gang that has El Salvador and other parts of Central America terrorized, was actually created in the ghettoes of Los Angeles decades ago, under George H.W. Bush’s policy of promoting crack cocaine. To solve the immigration crisis, the collapse of PRPD in the region needs to be radically reversed, for example, by having the U.S. work with China to fully integrate those countries into the Belt and Road Initiative. A first key project is to build a high-speed rail corridor from South America, through the Darien Gap (between Colombia and Panama) and all of Central America into Mexico, and from there on to North America as far north as the proposed Bering Strait tunnel. China and Panama are already jointly building the first leg of such a high-speed railroad from Panama City to the border with Costa Rica.
A second set of projects involves extending the Maritime Silk Road into the Caribbean Basin, constructing deep-water ports and associated industrial parks in Ponce, Puerto Rico and Mariel, Cuba, to serve as shipping hubs. This would be integrated with the recently expanded Panama Canal as well as the proposed Nicaraguan Grand Interoceanic Canal. The construction of the latter will require tens of thousands of skilled jobs, and its downstream impact will create hundreds of thousands of productive new jobs across Central America. Exemplary of the required approach was the June 18-19 trip to China and Russia by Bolivian President Evo Morales, who signed an 11-point joint declaration with President Xi announcing cooperation on infrastructure, industrialization, finance, trade, manufacturing, science and technology (including aerospace), education and culture, along with a document committing themselves to jointly building the Belt and Road Initiative. EU Proposals on Migrant Crisis Are Barbaric As was foreseeable, the mini EU summet, hastily convoked on June 24 at the request of Chancellor Merkel to discuss the migrant crisis in Europe, was in end effect another waste of time and money. The Visegrad group (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) boycotted the meeting from the beginning, and even the 16 leaders attending could not come up with a consensus on how to proceed on a European level. Although they all agree on the need to better seal off the external borders of the EU, the conflict subsists on the inner borders. At this point, no one expects the regularly scheduled EU summit on June 28-29 to deblock the situation, and certainly not to discuss to discuss the actual causes of the crisis, i.e., the wars, conflicts and looting policies supported by Europe. That makes the proposal put forth by Helga Zepp-LaRouche on June 15 all the more appropriate (cf. SAS 25/18). She elaborated on her proposal in an international webcast on four days before the mini summit, in which she blasted the solutions envisaged so far by the EU, the German government and others, as “completely unworkable, brutal, and barbaric”.  The idea, for example, of creating camps “outside the borders of the European Union in North African countries, to basically catch the refugees and deter them from coming to Europe -- this is barbaric.” She noted the hypocrisy of all those commentators and politicians who were up in arms against President Trump for allegedly “tearing babies from their mothers’ breasts” on the southern borders of the United States, but who have no objection to setting up camps in Africa or the Middle East, in countries where the situation is often chaotic and the governments are unable to control what goes on. “There are many reports that people in these camps were put into slavery, sold, raped, tortured.  Absolutely terrible conditions. And naturally, if you don’t address the real root cause of why people are coming to Europe, namely that the conditions in Africa are not yet in any shape to have people live there in many parts, then obviously, this is a completely unworkable solution.” Therefore, Zepp-LaRouche proposed that the EU change the agenda of the June 28-29 summit to exclusively discuss the issue of the development of Africa, in cooperation with China. Chinese officials should be invited to attend, as well as African heads of state who are already involved in cooperation with China. If they declare “a crash program for the infrastructural development of Africa”, the many desperate young people in Africa would see a great opportunity to develop their own countries, and not “feel compelled to travel through the Sahara and die of thirst, or drown in the Mediterranean, or be captured by
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Frontex [EU border] police to be put in something which even the Pope has characterized as concentration camps.” While the EU is unlikely to choose such a course at this point, there will be many other opportunities to implement what is the only reasonsable solution. Time Is Running out  for Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship While the deepening crisis among Germany’s political elite has already led left-leaning currents to envisage (albeit timidly) creating a new alliance for the next elections (cf. SAS 24/18), the momentum for change is also palpable in the conservative camp. It is being driven by the escalating conflict between Chancellor Angela Merkel and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer over who has the final say on how to deal with the refugee problem. This is not just a conflict between two members of the same cabinet, but between the leaders of the CDU (Angela Merkel)  and of the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, the CSU (Horst Seehofer). If Merkel fails in her attempt at the June 28-29 EU summit to obtain an EU-level solution to the migrant issue, Seehofer threatens to invoke the power of his ministry to begin implementing strict controls at the Bavarian borders with Austria and the Czech Republic to reduce the inflow of migrants. Angela Merkel, on the other hand, has threatened to use the authority of the Chancellorship to overrule any such decision, which means it could come to a final showdown between the two of them. In that case, “the end of the alliance between the CDU and CSU is imminent,” wrote the daily Die Welt . And that implies the likely end of Merkel’s chancellorship. As for the Social Democrats, who are part of the CDU-CSU government coalition, according to leaks from their headquarters in mid-June, the party is already preparing for the fall of the government and new elections after the summer recess. Indeed, if the CSU walks out of the coalition, the CDU and SPD would no longer have a parliamentary majority, and would depend on the goodwill of the opposition parties to govern. The question now being openly posed in the mainstream media is whether the CSU will attempt to expand beyond its traditional confinement to Bavaria to the rest of Germany – similar to Italy’s Lega party which successfully expanded from the Lombardy region to the national level. Seehofer’s party might then capitalize on the increasing unpopularity of the MerkelCDU among conservatives, to seriously challenge its erstwhile sister party. In that context, an INSA team opinion poll released last week delivered a shock: it found that the potential of a nationally-expanding CSU would reach 18%, with a CDU implanted in Bavaria coming in at 22%. In one way or another, the end of the Merkel era seems near, which is also what many Germans think: according to an opinion poll by the YouGov team published June 22 43% percent of those polled think Merkel should step down, and although 42% still think she should stay, no more than 32% believe the government coalition will survive to the end of its full term. All these scenarios are of course based on the CSU sticking to its anti-Merkel position. But even if it doesn’t, the coalition has already been undermined to such an extent that it will barely be able to govern. Washington-Pyongyang Diplomacy  Could Set a Precedent A flurry of diplomatic activity is following off of the historic June 12 summit between President Trump and Chairman
Kim in Singapore. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is the designated chief US negotiator, told the Detroit Economic Club on June 18 that he expected to return to the region very soon, and that US and North Korean teams are already pursuing details of the agreement. Chairman Kim, he said, had clearly committed to the complete denuclearization of Korea during his meeting with Trump. In return, the US will end the armistice with a full treaty, provide the security guarantees to Pyongyang they need and propose an end to sanctions, but only after denuclearization. The Trump Administration also cancelled the joint military exercise with South Korea scheduled for August. On June 21, in speaking to reporters, Pompeo made clear that he believes solid progress can be achieved towards denuclearization before the end of President Trump’s first term in two-and-a-half years. He also indicated that the United States has a comprehensive plan drawn up for how to achieve a Comprehensive, Verifiable, Irreversible Dismantling (CVID) of nuclear weapons within that time frame. For the past three months, the Administration has been working through a high-level task force, of more than 100 specialists in the region, in nuclear disarmament and other relevant areas. The implications of the progress in the US-DPRK talks go beyond the issue of security for Northeast Asia. President Trump pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal--the JCPOA--simultaneous to the diplomatic opening to Pyongyang. Trump has offered security guarantees to Kim that go beyond anything contained in the JCPOA agreement, and the Iranians will be closely watching the US-DPRK talks to determine whether there is any benefit to beginning negotiations with Washington. Yemen: Mass Media Reports  Are Largely Psy-war and Disinformation According to most media reports ten days ago, the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and backed by Britain, the United States and France, had taken over the airport of the port city of Al-Hudaydah in Yemen, and were heading east to cut off the road to Sana’a in order to prevent the Houthis from sending in reinforcements from the capital. Al-Hudaydah is home to more than one million suffering civilians, and is the only source of humanitarian aid and food and medicine imports for more than 18 million Yemenis, who live in areas controlled by the Ansarullah (Houthi) coalition in Sanaa. But many of those reports, coming from the Saudi-UAE military command and peddled through Saudi, UAE, British and American mass-media, were false. EIR sources on the ground in Al-Hudaydah, including at the airport, have provided visual material up to June 21, showing that the Yemeni forces of the Ansarullah were still in control of the airport. EIR also acquired video messages made by Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, a spokesman for Ansarullah in Al-Hudaydah from inside the airport on June 19, 20 and 21. The Houthis claim that the Saudi offensive is defeated and have broadcast video reports of fleeing Saudi-coalition tanks being shot at by their fighters. Moreover, in direct defiance of the Saudi coalition, the residents of Al-Al-Hudaydah city organized a large rally on June 22 in support of Ansarullah. The intervention by UN Special Envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths and his talks with the Ansarullah-controlled Sana’a government have raised doubts among the Houthis as to the real nature of his mission. He has reportedly proposed that the Houthis cede control of the city in order to allow humanitarian aid to enter the country. But as Houthi spokesmen have point
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ed out, the only reason that aid, food and medicine are blocked from entering Al-Al-Hudaydah is the bombing campaigns led by the Saudi coalition, which included a hospital run by Doctors without Borders in the city, in addition to the naval blockade of the port. However, following the reported pushing back of the Saudi offensive, and the international outcry against the horrific humanitarian crisis on the ground, the worst in the world today, Griffiths is travelling back to Sanaa for a new round of negotiations on avoiding an escalation of the violence. Any solution, however, must begin with an end to the bombing campaign and the offensives on the ground, in addition to ending the air-sealand blockade imposed on trade with Yemen. Then, a political solution can start, given that it is solely conducted by Yemeni parties without intervention by any outside forces. However, if the U.S., China and Russia pledge to support and guarantee the outcome of such a dialogue, it would have a great potential of success. Impulswelle Hosts Conference on the New Silk Road in Zurich On June 23, a one-day conference on “Peace through Development and Cooperation, The New Silk Road as Bridge Between East and West” took place in Zürich, organized by Impulswelle, a Swiss citizens association that collaborates with the Schiller Institute. Several speakers discussed aspects of the New Silk Road policy, from the history to the economic approach, from the response of the West to the development of Africa. After a brief introduction by Impulswelle president Doris Honegger, the latter issue in particular was dealt with by the first speaker, EIR Strategic Alert co-editor Claudio Celani, who reported about the breakthrough on Transaqua and briefed the audience on the potential offered by the new Italian government. Odile Mojon of the Schiller Institute France gave a critical report on the corruption of French elites and little known background on French President Emmanuel Macron. Professor Karl Eckstein and Engineer Paul Reichmann spoke respectively on “Russia and the Silk Road” and “Globalization 3.0, the Comeback of the Continent”. Impulswelle representative René Machu elaborated on how great projects can be financed with a Hamiltonian credit system and Vital Burger, President of the Swiss-Iranian Friendship Circle, explained that the war in Syria is being fed in order to block the New Silk Road from reaching the Mediterranean. A special highlight was a report on a recent visit to Syria by an Impulswelle delegation in the spirit of friendship, produced by Doris Honegger, Werner Frey and Christy Nader. In showing slides and videos of the various cities and localities visited and persons and groups of all ages, professions and religions they met, Frey stressed their great warmth and friendship, their openness to foreigners and the dignity of a population which has immediately started to rebuild the country despite the embargo, using the material and means available. Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s proposal to implement the “Singapore model” to solve the European refugee crisis, found general approval among the audience (cf. SAS 25/18). NYC Conference: “Grant Us Peace  Through Economic Development” The Schiller Institute held a conference on the above theme on June 9 in New York City. The deliberations centered on the need for international economic cooperation, in particular among the “four powers” -- United States, Russia, China, and
India -- as the basis for a new security architecture to guarantee peace. Schiller Institute Chair Helga Zepp-LaRouche gave the keynote speech showing how the “spirit of the New Silk Road” has become contagious. She was followed by Xu Wenhong, the Deputy Secretary General of Belt and Road Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who summarized the principles behind China’s One Belt, One Road initiative. He began, however, by congratulating Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the SI, which he has followed since 2007, for the “pioneer work” they have done in advancing the concept of the Land-Bridge. Representing Russia at the conference was Dmitry Polyanskiy, First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations from the Russian Federation, who first made a plea for an improvement in US-Russian relations, which are now at a deplorably low point. He then showed how the Eurasian Economic Union is becoming integrated with the Belt and Road Initiative. The afternoon session heard from Dennis Speed, the Northeast Coordinator of the Schiller Institute with a thorough-composed presentation of the “LaRouche Method as the seed-crystal of a new culture.” He was followed by James George Jatras, a former U.S. diplomat and former Adviser to the Republican Senate Leadership, who stressed the urgency of a summit between Presidents Trump and Putin to finally put an end to the outrageous “Russia-bashing” and war danger. Mr. Jatras recently released a petition together with Edward Lozansky, President of the American University in Moscow, calling on the two leaders to meet with the urgent task of stopping the danger of war (cf. SAS 22718). The last speaker was State Senator Richard Black of Virginia, who spoke on “The Strategic Importance of Victory, Peace and Development in Syria.” Tehe proceedings are available here: http://newparadigm.schillerinstitute.com/ blog/2018/06/14/nyc-conference-grant-us-peace-througheconomic-development/ On the following evening, the SI held a concert entitled Dona Nobis Pacem: 1968-2018 , in commemoration of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, both of whom were tragically assassinated in 1968. The SI New York City chorus and orchestra, together with soloists performed  Beethoven’s Mass in C Major . The program essay noted that “Beethoven once commented to a friend that if people took seriously the discovered principles embedded in his compositions, warfare within and among nations would become an impossibility.” Note to Subscribers This is a double issue as our editorial staff  will be attending the international Schiller Institute  conference on June 30-July 1 near Frankfurt.  Your next issue will be dated July 12, 2018.
E.I.R. STRATEGIC ALERT        www.eir.de  Published by: E.I.R.GmbH,  Bahnstr. 9a, 65205 Wiesbaden Tel.: 0611/73650, Fax: 0611/9740935, Email:  info@eir.com Verantwortl. f. d. Inhalt: Dean Andromidas, Claudio Celani Subscription: EUR 3000/ ISSN  0936-7527 © E.I.R. GmbH  Alle Rechte vorbehalten, auch die des Nachdrucks von Auszügen, derphotomechanischen Wiedergabe und der Übersetzung